In an era where the internet has become an inevitable source of life as necessary as constructions and electricity, the question of whether women are safe on the net is not detached from the question of who is actually safe in Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, that question has a troubling answer: women are not. The rapid digital access of the country, pioneered under the “Digital Bangladesh” initiative, has extended opportunity and connectivity for millions. But it has also unlocked new platforms of violence against women. Such platforms are harder to track, easier to reject, and far more destructive to the victim’s social status than their offline counterparts.
This essay sheds light on the fact that technology-facilitated violence against women in Bangladesh is not only a technology problem; it is the digital sextortion of a patriarchal society that has long policed women’s bodies, sexuality, and autonomy. The unsuccessful measures to tackle it stem from three shared reinforcing conditions: a culture of survivor-blaming and defamation that ostracizes the survivors; critical analyses and distortions in the legal framework; and the absence of meaningful digital awareness, particularly for marginalized women and girls in rural and semi-urban areas. Addressing cyber violence requires tackling all three at the same time, not sequentially.
The Broader Views of Digital Sextortion Against Women in Bangladesh
Internet subscription in Bangladesh surpassed 56 million users by early 2016, and the widespread publicity has only expanded since. With access, however, came exploitation. The forms of cyber violence against women are differentiated but follow known patterns. Firstly, disclosure without any consents, sharing of private images (commonly called “revenge porn”), cyber harassment, fake social media accounts used for negative publicity, sexual harassment or sextortion through direct messages and comment sections, and blackmail, facilitating private photographs or videos. Each of these is not something that has newly emerged as a form of violence; it is an old face made up with the newest version of ideas, with an uncontrollable and negative form of violence.
The harm is not only acceptable but also condemnable. Documented cases highlight that underage and young women have committed suicide following the widespread negative publicity of private images online. In rural areas, women who are constantly being surveilled by hidden cameras, sometimes by neighbors or known as well as familiar faces, face sextortion, forced sexual encounter blackmail, and the threat of social ostracization. A young woman in such a case who asks for police help may figure out that the officer issues a general diary, stems a forced bond from the abuser, and considers the case is over, while the video may still exist on other devices, and the trauma endures without assistance.
Yet the gap between law on paper and law in practice is limited. A Right to Information query by the Bangladesh Legal Aid Services and Trust found that fewer than 5% of cases filed under the ICT Act were complaints of harassment by women. A particularly exposing case of the BRAC-launched app “Maya Apa,” a digital health platform with a female-presence-based identity, grabbed the unwanted attention of the explicit comments, sexually instigated advances or unwanted offers, and unanswerable proposals from users, highlighting that even a machine-supported idea of online female presence is not spared from sexual harassment by the predators. This tells us that the crisis is not about individual harassers with individual crime patterns. It highlights a long history of the normalization of entitlement over women’s digital appearances.
Survivors Blaming vs Shaming Culture: The First Attempt at Silencing Voices
Violence against women has historically been regarded as a private as well as family matter in Bangladesh, obliterated by societal values, in the name of “honor” and family privacy. Cyber violence brings this silence, consolidated by the additional shame of having been “watchable” online. When a woman discloses that a private image has been circulated without her permission, the first question she often receives from legal enforcement officials, as well as from police, family, and even lawyers, is not “who did this?” but “why did you allow that person?” This merged idea of consent to have intimate relations with partners equates to allowing to disclose sheds light on a deep, misinformed idea of patriarchal autonomy, one that the legal enforcement has been irresponsible to correct, and that culture rejoins daily.
The language used against women survivors is similarly existing while addressing them as “slut,” “shameless,” “bad woman.” These are not recent insults. They are the controlling mechanisms, designated to ensure the barriers between received and rejected femininity. A woman who had a private affair, even a married woman, is not safe either, whose intimate moments are disclosed by a husband or former boyfriend, and is made to bear the sole moral load of the crime committed against her, even though she is the survivor. This self-proclaimed moral obligation, where the survivor’s virtue is on trial rather than the instigator’s crime, is what keeps most cases from ever reporting to a police station or taking legal action.
Student surveys operated at Dhaka-based universities highlight the preexisting perspectives of this mindset. The fact that answers to questions about penalization for revenge pornography varied mostly from long jail terms to ideas of “religious punishment” to obstruct reveals not just a legal dilemma but profound normative insecurity. Society has not yet accepted that the uninformed distribution of intimate images is equally wrong, regardless of the circumstances of their situation. Until it does, survivors-blaming as well as shaming will remain the constant response.
The Legal Framework: Broken, Misunderstood, and Underutilized
Bangladesh does not lag in the laws relevant to cyber violence against women. Section 57 of the Information Communication Technology Act 2006 addresses fake, obscene, or defamatory electronic content, with penalties up to 14 years imprisonment. The Pornography Control Act 2012 criminalizes the non-consensual production and distribution of pornographic content. The Nari O Shishu Nirjatan Daman Ain 2000 covers sexual oppression. Section 69 of the Bangladesh Telecommunication Control Act 2001 covers obscene digital communications. The BNWLA v. Government of Bangladesh judgment of 2009 extended the definition of sexual harassment to include certain forms of online speech.
Between 2013 and 2016, the Cyber Crime Tribunal executed 520 cases, with only 90 female victims appearing. These figures do not emphasize that cyber violence against women is not prevalent. They suggest that women are not reaching it to the tribunal. Several structural problems paved the way towards this failure. First, the ICT Act’s utilization has been criticized for being more supportive of protecting political figures from defamation than of protecting women from cyber violence. The law’s changed language has been used to minimize the voices of journalists and activists, having a threatening effect on freedom of speech, even as it fails to save women. Second, enforcement is overwhelmingly concentrated in Dhaka, resulting in rural and suburban women without effective access to cybercrime mechanisms. Third, the legal understanding of “consent” in this sector remains dangerously underdeveloped. High Court reasoning has at times implied that a woman who permits intimate photographs to be taken has implicitly consented to their distribution, a position that combines one form of consent with another, entirely different act.
The drafted Digital Security Act and Cyber Crimes Act presented a way for reformation. Yet the previous drafts drew criticism for clauses that would permit warrantless prosecution and impose unequal penalties for unclearly defined offenses, alarming questionable civil liberties under the threatening conditions. The challenge is to make laws that are brief enough to secure women without being elaborated enough to ensure authoritarian exploitation, a coordination that asks for genuine multi-stakeholder recommendations engaging civil society, feminist legal experts, and survivors.
Digital Education: The Missing Foundation
Across Bangladesh, particularly outside city centers, many internet users connect Facebook with the internet itself. Privacy settings, two-factor authentication, and content removal procedures are mostly uninformed. For women, this unaware situation carries a complicated challenge. Female mobile users in rural as well as remote areas may send their cell phones or mobiles for repair without first protecting their data, leaving private photographs and messages accessible to mobile repair shop owners and technicians. Young women who accept friend requests on social media from unknown people are not clueless; they are operating within a digital network that has not guided risk.
Digital Education is not simply about knowing how to use technology. It is about realizing power: who controls the platforms, what data is restored, what solutions exist when something goes in another direction, and, as a result, that being harassed online is not someone’s fault. The language barrier is a real challenge, as most privacy interfaces are in English, which is a linguistic barrier in terms of being inaccessible to the majority of Bangladeshi women who are not familiar with understanding them. An effective digital awareness program must be in Bangla with a visual presentation to make it more inclusive, contextually strong, and distributed through reliable community institutions: schools, NGO networks, and women’s groups.
Meanwhile, user areas like Google and Facebook used to receive more intellectual rights complaints than reports of image-based abuse, and now the scenario is changing. A survivor can sometimes appeal to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asserting copyright over a self-taken image to compel a platform to remove it. This is a workaround, not a solution, but it illustrates how digital literacy can translate directly into protection. Expanding awareness of such tools, alongside formal legal remedies, must be part of any comprehensive response.
A Policy Agenda: What Must Be Done
Effective policy cannot be decided based on one way of addressing this crisis alone. Three interlinked pillars are required. The first is legal change with feminist and gender-inclusive precision. Bangladesh needs intended legal action that defines non-consensual private picture sharing as a unique crime, clarifies the meaning of digital consent, creates inclusive and decentralized reporting mechanisms, and ensures that cybercrime legal actions reach beyond Dhaka. Legal change must be accompanied by judicial awareness; judges, lawyers, and police officers must understand that a woman’s past intimacy does not constitute consent to future exposure. The current penal code dates to 1860; the cyber environment it is now asked to govern did not exist in 1860. Updating the framework is not optional; it is overdue.
The second pillar is cultural change through education. Public awareness campaigns must reconstruct technology-facilitated violence not as a result of women’s behavior, but as an offense of power and seizure. This reconstruction must begin in schools and universities, where the normalization of pornography-informed behaviors toward women contributes to the unofficially agreeable situation in which cyber violence emerges. Student-led awareness, such as “Youth Against Revenge Porn,” represents the kind of community-driven campaign that can change behaviors in ways that a government-initiated campaign cannot.
The third pillar is coordinated institutional action. Technology-facilitated violence does not follow the boundaries between law-based agencies and NGOs, between urban and rural areas, or between Bangladesh and the international platforms that host harmful content. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, mobile network operators, digital platforms, civil society organizations, and legal aid providers must develop shared protocols. An online complaint portal with Bangla-language support and accessible reporting pathways would significantly reduce the difficulty for survivors seeking assistance.
Conclusion
The internet is neither inherently liberating nor inherently oppressive. It reflects and extends the power structures of the world it inhabits. In Bangladesh, where patriarchal values remain deeply entrenched, the digitalization of daily life has created new challenges for the old struggle against women’s independence and autonomy. Revenge porn, cyberstalking, and digital blackmail are not technological anomalies; they are forms of violence, and they must be treated as such.
The way forward requires confronting what has failed: laws that exist but are not enforced, institutions that function but remain inaccessible to many, and a culture that continues to blame women rather than perpetrators. Bangladesh possesses the legislative framework, civil society energy, and youth activism necessary to build meaningful change. What is required is the political commitment to place women’s safety at the center of cybersecurity development rather than treating it as a secondary concern.
When young women in Dhaka’s universities call for stronger punishment against perpetrators of revenge porn, and when survivors in rural areas seek help only to be turned away, they are asking for the same thing: that their dignity be treated as non-negotiable. Meeting that demand is not only a legal or technical obligation. It is a moral one.
References
Bangladesh Legal Aid Services and Trust. (2016). Report of expert consultation: Responding to violence against women and girls in the cyber age. https://www.blast.org.bd/
Bangladesh National Women Lawyers’ Association v. Government of Bangladesh, Writ Petition No. 5916 (High Court Division 2009).
Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission. (2016). Internet subscribers in Bangladesh, January 2016. http://www.btrc.gov.bd/
Crown Prosecution Service. (2016). Violence against women and girls crime report 2015–16. https://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/docs/cps_vawg_report_2016.pdf
Information and Communication Technology Act, 2006 (Bangladesh).
Kabir, N. I. (2018). Cyber crime: A new form of violence against women: From the case study of Bangladesh. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://ssrn.com/abstract=3153467
Nari O Shishu Nirjatan Daman Ain, 2000 (Bangladesh).
Peterson, J., & Densley, J. (2017). Cyber violence: What do we know and where do we go from here? Aggression and Violent Behavior, 34, 193–200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2017.06.008
Pornography Control Act, 2012 (Bangladesh).
World Bank. (2015). Mobile cellular subscriptions (per 100 people), Bangladesh. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.CEL.SETS.P2
